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Friday, October 31, 2008

First off Happy Halloween, I hope everyone stays safe tonight while they go out & trick or treat. I will be over at a friends house grilling up about 100 hot dogs for all the folks in their neighborhood. Our friends have been doing this for a few years now, but tonight their two sons are playing in a football game and they would have had to stop the tradition, so a few of us volunteered to do this for them, so tonight I will be grillin!

Tomorrow though I will be battling for supremacy in our first "Gathering in the Desert" primer event. Now some of you may known that I was planning on taking the Dwarfs to war. But after about 5 games now with the list I had not pulled out even a minor win. The best I have done with them was a draw against Mikes Urk-Hai, and the only reason it was a tie was due to running out of time. I am pretty sure that Mike would have beat me in that scenario.

So I decided to change up my list and try something new. Now this new list has a total of 27 models in it for 346 points and I have never played it before, so this will make it very interesting. here is a teaser of where the army hails from:

I know this is a cheesy hint, but for some of you Uber Lord of the Rings fans you may know where this is, but I will post up pictures after the event as well as how well the army did.

Lastly, after painting up 3 LotR armies this year (Mikes Urk-Hai, My Easterlings & Dwarfs) as well as a huge Russian army in 28mm for Tom, I am looking for something else to do. I still have a few painting projects left for other people (Toms LotROrcs & BFG, Mikes Arnica buildings) but I am looking for something different. Enter the Tomb Kings! About a year ago I bought a huge Tomb King Army (About 4000 to 5000 points) from Tom O, he got it off E-bay for only $230.00, and that's what I paid for it from him. Well I had hoped this year to be able to participate in a local challenge that we dubbed "A Tale of a Few Gamers", but I flaked out.

Well after looking for something to do and with talking with my buddy Rob, I decided to bust out the Tomb Kings to give them a try. So I will start assembling 1000 points this Sunday, so wish me luck and I will post a few pictures along the way...

Thursday, October 16, 2008

I guess I am asking that myself, so I thought I would do a small update on what I have coming up.

Well for LotR, besides doing some trade painting for a buddy (Yes Tom that's you!) I will be painting up some orcs for him, about 60 or 70 or so, nothing to large! Also have more dwarfs to paint up as well as a few odds & ends. Terrain wise for LotR, I will be building a few more rock mounds that I have built in the past for our upcoming GT in Feb 09. I also have decided to try my hand at building the Throne from Amon Hen found in the first LotR Journey book, but will be doing it out of plastic. I will also be finishing up my Fangorn/Mirkwood project as well.

On the Legends of the High Seas front, I will be adding pirates to my already huge collection of figures. I will be running a multi-player game at Adepticon 2009 on Friday & Saturday night which will allow 10 players each night to take control of a Crew and look for lost treasure on a cursed island. This means I need to make sure I have 100 painted pirates for the game as well as some of the "Exotic" encounters that players may run across, so I will have to paint up a few of these things as well. Luckily one of the guys in Chicago will be helping out with the terrain, so that's covered, he also volunteered to supply me with a few of his Pirates as well. Depending on how far I get I may take him up on that!

So there you go, that's what I will be up to in the next few months, I will be posting here as I get things done. Also I will be giving you a report on how well the dwarfs did while at the Nov 1st event.

Oh one last thing, I usually don't post anything up very political on this site, but I really need to encourage folks to vote in November. I will not go into who I think you should vote for, that's up to you to decide, but please please please get out there and vote! All I will say is that I am afraid of the supposed "Change" some folks are touting as their campaign platform, their idea of change could change our Capitalist way of life into a socialist way of living, so get out there & vote! Okay political rant off.

Thursday, October 02, 2008

Well they are done! 31 models ready for the November 1st tourney here in Phoenix. As you can see I went for a compromise on the basing, I went with a dark brown with dead grass for the flock, I think they came out rather well.

Here is the Leader Gimli in a close up, I happen to have about 5 different Gimli models and this one I have been wanting to paint for some time.

Here are two more shots of the army.

I happen to still have a ton of dwarfs to paint so there will be a few more to come like Khazad Guard, Iron Warriors, Rangers, Dwarven Kings, the list goes on & on. Now I think I need to work on my Red Dragon entries or perhaps the Dark Lord himself.

Well its been 17 days and no updates, what gives? Well I could go on & on about being busy with real life stuff, but I will not bore you. but I have been painting and the dwarfs are just about done, so lets get to it!

The last time we saw the dwarfs they were primed black with a dry brush of an off white color. Now I go back in & paint the basic colors in, some call this block painting I call it paint by numbers, here is a shot of the archers after they were blocked in.

There is nothing fancy just straight colors painted on, what you can't see in the picture is the highlighting I did stands out a bit on the white spots as opposed to the black areas. I painted the whole force this way and basically did an assembly line sort of painting. Once I had them all base painted I moved onto the next section, dipping!

Now there are many online articles out there about the speed method of "Dipping" so I will not go into all that, but a quick explanation is that you are washing the figure or dipping the figure in a urethane stain to give you instant shading. Here is what I use:

Now Minwax Polyshades makes a variety of colors but what I found that works well is the Tudor Satin color which is a blackish color. You will also notice I use Mineral Spirits as well, this is for clean up as well as controlling how much "Dip" I put on a figure. You see I really don't dip the figure in (That's were the term comes from) I brush on the stain. I just slop it on with the brush & set aside. I do use the mineral spirits to take away any extra stain I don't want on the figure, like pooling of the stain in low spots. I just dip the brush into some mineral spirits and touch on the figure, pretty easy really. Now once the dipped figure has dried, I shoot it with Testors Dullcoate, the nice thing about dipping is that you get three things out of it, one is the instant shading, two is a hard protective coating & thirdly you get a shiny model. Hence the reason for the Dullcoate. Here is a shot of a figure blocked in (on the left) and a dipped figure after Dullcoate (on the right).

Here is another shot of the dipped Axeman after Dullcoate.

Now once all the figures were painted I needed to texture the base, I use Liquitex Ceramic Stucco and I put it on the base.

The nice thing is it dries white and gives you a nice ground effect. Now Liquitex does make other pastes and I have tried some of these but I always go back to the Ceramic Stucco. here is the whole 350 point force textured.Next up will be painting the base & flocking them, my biggest issue at this point is what color to use. I can go with a grey color simulating rock underground, or I can go with browns to represent being outdoors, I still have not decided yet, that will be in the next post.

Now also besides the Dwarfs, I painted up a few Giant Spiders, a couple of Bat Swarms and the Spider queen in the last few days, here they are.

Here is the GW LotR Spider Queen, you will notice that I converted the model by cutting the legs apart & bending them to look more realistic. The GW one shown below has its front & rear legs molded together, it really looks terrible and not vary lifelike, so all I did was cut them apart, I think it looks better now & as a side note, my wife will not pick up the model!